People constantly seek information for work and everyday life, for example, looking for carriers to ship company goods or searching for vacation destinations. Information seeking, however, can often be time consuming and difficult for several reasons. First, a complex information seeking task often requires multiple pieces of information about different but related entities and aspects. Because today's information retrieval systems are largely designed to process one search query at a time, a user may have to manually craft multiple queries to express his or her information needs, issue them one by one for retrieval, and manually aggregate information gathered at different steps. Second, during information seeking, a user may need to revisit one or more previously issued search requests and modify them in order to satisfy his or her evolving information needs. Without system support for easily revising an earlier search request in context, he or she may have to start over again. Third, a new or modified search request may change the context of previous searches and trigger the need to update corresponding results. Since few existing information retrieval systems automatically re-evaluate past requests and provide updates, a user may have to perform manual updates for earlier searches.
Due to the lack of support by information retrieval systems for complex information seeking tasks, people typically use text editing or word processing applications for taking notes of search requests and relevant results to aid information seeking. Since note-taking applications are not capable of directly retrieving information based on notes, however, a user may have to constantly switch back and forth between information retrieval systems and note-taking applications during information seeking, which may further increase the amount of time and effort required for accomplishing a task.
A need therefore exists for an information system that integrates the functionalities of information retrieval and note-taking to better assist users in information seeking.